When Russian troops and armoured vehicles entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, Europe moved into an unpredictable new era that tore apart established certainties and shattered peace and stability. The Russian invasion began an extended war that has cost thousands of lives, laid waste to much of Ukraine and unleashed the biggest movement of people out of their homeland for nearly a century. Since it began, the war has dominated daily media reports, political debate and countless international meetings. The rest of Europe watched in admiration as Ukrainian armed forces and citizens contained the Russian attack. The horrors of Russian violence have shocked and roiled the European continent.

The war is a tragedy for Ukraine, but also represents a transformative challenge for the whole European order. Beyond the atrocities and the shifting day-to-day dynamics of battle, Russia's conflict in Ukraine has profound implications for European politics and security. Alongside the human suffering and violence, the war invites searching questions about the whole way in which European security, politics and economics are organized. The war is not simply one stand-alone conflict but has structural and continental ramifications. What can be referred to as the “European order” has been shaken to the core.

At this level, the invasion was as momentous as it was shocking. Even the most knowledgeable and respected of analysts and politicians believed such an invasion to be beyond the realms of possibility. And when the invasion did begin, the same observers almost in unison could see no outcome other than a swift Russian occupation covering most of Ukraine. European governments had to scramble to adapt to Ukraine's sterner than expected resistance. Moreover, the war is not only game-changing in itself but has also unleashed or deepened many related challenges: the extent to which the war has affected so many areas of international politics, energy policies and economic trends has added further layers of concern across Europe. The outbreak of war and the events that have happened since have opened a Pandora's box of spill-over troubles.

While analysis has understandably focused on the war itself, this book examines these more structural and longer-term consequences for Europe as a whole. The most pressing policy question for European governments has been whether their support for Ukraine has been sufficient decisively to impact the immediate course of war – and as the conflict continues this question remains disconcertingly open.

The flipside to the logic of exclusion is a new logic of inclusion. Processes have begun to move the geographical space of the European project outwards. Russia's war on Ukraine has opened the possibility of a reshaped geography of European politics. The conflict has prompted the EU to advance the prospect of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia becoming members. Separately, an embryonic European Political Community has been created that additionally includes the UK, Turkey and other non-EU states; although this format does not yet have a guaranteed future it could end up resembling something akin to a loose concert of European powers. These steps point towards a territorial redesign of European order.

For now, this redesign is a possibility, not a certain outcome. The ultimate extent of geographical reordering remains unclear. Many sceptics feel that the offer of membership to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia is low-cost symbolism, unlikely ever to reach fruition. If further enlargement does not advance as the main institutional basis for a wider and more inclusive European order, debates will centre on how far a looser diplomatic concert might fulfil this function. The re-ordering of 1989 shifted the European project's border decisively to the East; the Ukraine war has opened the likelihood of it moving further outwards, although this is still to materialize in definitive form.

NEW FRONTIERS

Russia's invasion has catalysed a revived process of EU enlargement and opened debates about NATO membership too; Figure 6.1 shows the new situation regarding EU applicant states. Most European governments were implacably opposed to any widening of Euro-Atlantic borders before the war started. Indeed, in the years prior to the invasion, “re-bordering” debates were not about inclusion but the inverse process of rebuilding frontiers, reflecting an inward-looking concern with identity protection in response to populism.1 Governments’ change of heart on this question captures just how far-reaching an impact the war may have at the level of system-ordering.

NATO has moved to include Finland and Sweden as new members and the alliance's members stress that they are positively minded to invite in Ukraine after the war ends. As yet, they have held back from making a formal offer to Ukraine, whose government applied to join NATO in September 2022. Some eastern EU member states quickly expressed firm support for the application and by mid-2023 the UK and French governments were also moving in favour.

The socialist map has as its own stated goal the achievement of the most free and humane society in world history. Indeed, part of what distinguishes socialism is its unmatched sense of future potential as it self-consciously seeks to attain a form of politics that surpasses all prior regimes and epochs. Developed into a tradition during the nineteenth century, socialists expanded the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment beyond liberalism and individualistic rights. Where liberals often think of themselves as the peak of the Enlightenment, socialists instead argue that liberalism has not taken its own revolutionary promise and exercise of critical reason far enough. The Enlightenment itself needs to be further enlightened. New worlds must be created not yet charted on the liberal map.

One of the most distinctive features of socialism is its radical egalitarianism and vision of human flourishing, which it advances in the name of the entire species but especially the working class and the poor. Socialism is a form of radical humanism. Its primary nemesis in furthering its agenda is the capitalist system and its collaborators. Capitalism, on the socialist view, is not a unified society but a bundle of conflicting classes and alienated individuals manipulating one another in the pursuit of self-interest. What liberal capitalists call “freedom”, socialists instead see as a self-defeating egoism that leads to cyclical outbreaks of political, economic and ecological crisis.

Unlike classical liberals, socialists do not pit individual freedom and material equality against one another. To the contrary, personal emancipation is only possible in the socialist view if substantive material equality has been communally secured. This is because most forms of socialism define freedom as a kind of flourishing that includes not only the elimination of serious material privations but also the attendant education and leisure needed to exercise higher human capacities. Among these higher-order activities is participation in a cooperative, solidaristic community that is an alternative to capitalism's status quo of individuals and families competitively fending for themselves.

Liberalism is a map whose recurring landmarks include: the establishment of individual rights, the formation of government based on a contract, equality before the law, the protection of private property, and an affirmation of religious and ethical tolerance. This map has at times appeared so utterly dominant in the United States as to create the illusion of being the country's lone ideology. As the political scientist Louis Hartz declared, “there has never been a ‘liberal movement’ or a real ‘liberal party’ in America: we have only had the American Way of Life”. According to Hartz, all major ideological conflict in the USA was an intramural debate between left-versus-right liberals, who might disagree over specific rights (say, the right to gun ownership or the right to healthcare) but never questioned the fundamental existence of individual rights as such. Indeed, even the country's leading poets echoed liberal ideas about the freedom to noninterference, teaching adages like “good fences make good neighbors”. And every American intuitively sensed that the best fences were not made of metal or solid board but of individual rights.

In this way, the United States was imagined as the land of liberalism, its ideological coordinates baked into the very canyons, forests, deserts and highways. Any ideology outside of liberalism's borders (say, socialism or fascism) was deemed un-American, an invasive species. Likewise, forms of racial hierarchy that seemingly flourished in the United States, were classified as anomalous and fringe. Hartz, for instance, suggested that racial hierarchy was mostly limited to the American South, which was the “alien child in a liberal family” that “after the Civil War … fell quickly into oblivion”.

Today no serious scholar of American politics accepts Hartz's breezy dismissal of the South or his attempt to expunge other regions of participation in racism. Instead, Hartz's thesis is interesting not as an empirical truth of social science, but as an artifact of liberal ideology itself. Although Hartz thought of himself as offering value-neutral descriptions of the political topography, he was instead unwittingly retracing and reinforcing the lines of an ideological map.

The Lockean and Hartzian vision of North America as the primordial land of liberalism makes for a rapturous story. Yet as a historical narrative, it is no less mythological than the story of Romulus being suckled at the teat of a she-wolf. For better or worse, since before its founding, North America has been the site of clashing and rivalrous ideologies.

This chapter looks at two non-liberal maps that were present well before 1776. The first is a communal and participatory form of democracy – civic republicanism – that continues to inspire heterodox politics on both the left and the right. The second is a hierarchical racial politics – White supremacy – that erected several caste systems domestically and wove itself into later fascist movements across the globe. Both of these ideologies continue to mix and blend in complex ways with other maps, including not only liberalism but also conservatism, nationalism, ecologism, and more. To fail to decode their symbols is to remain blind to the persistent ideological multiplicity of contemporary life.

THE FREEDOM OF CITIES

Civic republicanism might at first blush appear as an obscure ideological map whose territories have been heard of by only a few academics. But in truth, although a relatively small political tradition, civic republicanism has exercised an outsized influence in part by hybridizing with larger movements led by classical liberals, Greens, conservatives and socialists. It has left its mark, for example, on front-porch conservatives wishing to devolve power onto locality, as well as heterodox socialists who reject statism and wish for a democracy inspired by the Greek polis.

In North America, this ideology first took root in the Puritan townships of New England, with their fierce sense of independent self-rule. As the great theorist of civic republicanism – the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville – put it in Democracy in America: “I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores”. Unlike natural-rights liberalism, civic republicans ascribe freedom not primarily to autonomous individuals but to the entire community and specifically cities. Such freedom is a cooperative accomplishment and not a natural, individualistic given.

We have now travelled across the ideological maps that inspired the intense polarization of politics into the opposing camps of left versus right. And yet we have also seen that this language is inadequate as we have encountered all sorts of bizarre hybrids, including revolutionary conservatives, gradualist and market socialists, libertarian fascists, communist ultra-nationalists, and more. Indeed, although we continue to use the language of “left versus right”, a cultural approach reveals that there is something woefully deficient and even deceptive about this language. We should be uncomfortable with it, even if it persists as a useful shorthand.

Ideological maps exhibit subtle and complex resonances with one another, which are obscured by the left–right linear taxonomy. Indeed, it remains unclear what is being measured or spatialized across the standard spectrum, often sequenced as:

If one suggests that this ideological measuring tape is organized from the centre outward according to units of “individual freedom”, or “democracy”, it becomes immediately apparent that a definition from a specific ideological map is being pulled out and used to position and locate the others.

The spectrum then implies definitions of democracy and liberty that are particular to liberalism. After all, communists, socialists, conservatives, and even fascists often claim to be expressive of popular sovereignty and to achieve the proper form of liberation. Unsurprisingly, on this schema liberalism appears as not only the freest but also the most rationally “moderate” and “reasonable”. As one reaches the “extreme” radicals of the left and right (communists and fascists) the tips of the line meet and bend into a horseshoe. Supposedly this is because these two ideologies are equally collectivist, statist and totalitarian. But this again reveals that this “neutral”, “descriptive” chart of the world's ideologies is in fact coloured by liberal ideological presuppositions.

As if this were not bad enough, the linear language of left–right also does modern people the extreme disservice of suggesting a kind of unbridgeable gap between particular ideologies.

Today it has again become fashionable to declare liberalism “failed” and totally sapped as a political culture. But ideologies are like rivers. They remain constant by continually swirling and changing. In the modern world, the major ideologies rarely if ever dry up, but instead pick new paths as they churn and mix with other cultural streams, rolling down the canyons, deltas and plains of history. For this reason, no human observer is able to predict with certainty an ideology's demise. Ideologies are, by their very nature, renewable.

One might suspect from reading the first chapter on classical liberalism that this tradition is done and dusted. But the truth is liberalism has never gone away. To the contrary, it is one of the most powerful political cultures shaping the modern world. It also continues to be a common, although by no means exclusive, ideological basis for capitalism. True, liberal-capitalism has experienced many dramatic crises, and sometimes teetered on the brink of collapse. But rather than disappearing, this complex conglomerate of meanings, practices, institutions, patterns of action, and regimes, has shown a tremendous ability to evolve and reinvent itself.

This chapter turns to liberalism one final time to examine how this massive tradition underwent two earthshaking transformations in the twentieth century that helped create a fierce polarization between left-versus-right variants. So strong is the division internal to contemporary liberalism that the two factions are often on friendlier terms with those outside their own tradition than with the opposing wing of their own ideology.

THE PROGRESSIVE CASE FOR POSITIVE RIGHTS

The left variant of liberalism is often referred to as “progressive” to underscore its conviction that liberal politics ought to be actively involved in evolving through history in order to more deeply realize individual freedom. Progressivism is also sometimes called “social liberalism” to signal its attempt to reform classical liberalism's atomistic streak. As a cultural map, this ideology pursues individual liberty, but in a way that experiments with new practices and allows for communal cooperation and a greater role for government.

To be sure, progressivism's departure from classical liberalism can be overstated. It inherits from this older tradition a number of key themes, including: the authority of natural reason; the affirmation of pluralism; the separation of church and state; the need for liberties of press, association, individual expression, and personal property.

What is ideology? The answer is simple, if you do not think about it very hard. Ideology is politics in excess – distorted, immoderate and delusional. It is pundits shouting at each other and unruly mobs chanting in the streets. It is an uncle ranting about socialism at holiday dinners or a co-worker lowering his voice to whisper about the dangers of “the system”. Facts are of no avail when dealing with the victims of ideology; rational arguments slide off their brains like rain running down a granite dome.

As part of this, it has also become an unspoken rule to avoid describing your own politics as ideological. Respectable political ideas are best labelled a “belief system”, “theory”, “philosophy”, or even plain old “common sense”. This is because your own politics are obviously reasonable and good, while those of an adversary are demonstrably irrational and false. If you are progressive, “ideology” is what coerces millions of people into conformity with inherited hierarchies and strips individuals of their freedom and well-being. If you are a conservative, “ideology” is a systematic attempt to replace the traditional moral order with faddish and radical ideas that eventually lead to societal decline and collapse. For both sides, escaping ideology is as simple as switching teams and adopting the one-andonly true and defensible politics.

The result of all this confusion and mutual accusation – as the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz brilliantly summed up – is “the term ‘ideology’ has itself become thoroughly ideologized”.Ideology is a snake swallowing its own tail; it is an idea that consumes itself. Indeed, what many people think of as the obvious definition of ideology is nothing more than one more flower growing inside their ideological garden. Every time we seek to rein in ideology, we end up expanding its scope.

But why are we all so confident that our own convictions are immune to the very ideology plainly afflicting everyone else? This book begins from the deceptively straightforward claim that part of our problem is we have forgotten that politics is cultural.

We live in an age of ideologies. This political reality is in a strange way given, even fated. None of us can help or change the epoch any more than a medieval peasant could leap out of the cosmic chain of being. An age of ideologies will surely come to an end, but no one knows when or how. To grasp by what cultural mutation it might be superseded, would already imply the first dawning of that future time. When such a new reality is visible it will already, in some senses, be upon us.

No living person can see beyond an age of ideologies because it consumes the current horizon of the visible. Indeed, as these pages have shown time and again, to believe one can do without ideology is simply to naively extend its domain. Even when individuals disavow ideology, or seem unable to coherently reconstruct their own beliefs, they nonetheless remain encircled by its meanings, which are embodied in institutions, patterns of action and practices. Ideology is never just in our heads, but has built our social reality. Its many maps govern the contours of our world.

As in the ancient Jewish story of the Tower of Babel, ideologies are like spires which humans raise relentlessly towards the sky in an effort to achieve a God's eye view – to loom above history and resolve the anguished problems of human injustice, violence, fighting, oppression and disorder. Those who make the effort to climb the stairs of a particular tradition's Tower of Babel, find not only various weak points in the structure along the way, but also (as in the famous paintings by Pieter Bruegel) the pinnacle unfinished. Every ideological tower reaches a point of inarticulacy where it is permanently in ruins even as it is being built.

Feminism began in Europe with the deceptively straightforward call to extend suffrage and the liberal “rights of man” to women. Yet it immediately became clear that this project required expansion beyond the liberal state into domains of life largely ignored as apolitical or “private” by liberal politics. Perhaps more than any other ideological map, feminism moved the politics of the “private” into the public square: from personal psychology and household labour to erotic desire and religion. So powerful has feminism's remoulding of these areas been, that no major ideological map has remained wholly untouched by it. Progressives and conservatives, socialists and nationalists, have all found it necessary to wrestle with feminist criticism, sometimes modifying their practices despite strenuous resistance.

Consider, for instance, that no mass movement in the West calls for rolling back the entirety of feminism's revolution. Every ideology now includes among its own ranks members who embrace some of feminism's innovations, such as: female access to education and the professions, the loosening of dress codes and social taboos, and so on. The boundary line on acceptable gender expressions may be vastly different according to rival ideological groups, but the line has undoubtedly moved – and the name of the mover, historically speaking, is feminism. Indeed, even the most traditional and reactionary ideological factions appear unlikely to ever fully return to the cultural norms that prevailed before feminism's arrival.

All this might lead one to hastily conclude: “we are all feminists now!” However, this would be premature. Not only do pockets of resistance to feminism persist, but males still dominate the chief institutions of power, with women also regularly experiencing inequality both in the home and the workplace. In this sense, one could just as easily declare: “there is no truly feminist society on Earth!”

The apparent paradox of feminism's universal triumph and endless postponement is resolved by recognizing that feminism is not one thing but a multiplicity of competing maps. Indeed, feminism's ideological mutations are commonly clustered into three distinct “waves”.

Conservatism is a cultural map foregrounding traditional society as worthy of veneration and defence against waves of avantgardism and modernizing change. As William F. Buckley, a leading activist of this ideology, quipped: a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. Recurrent themes of conservative ideology include: sacred tradition, time-tested folkways, conventional morality, inherited authority, a critique of rationalism in politics, the need for prudence, and a call for cautious and incremental change. True to its designation, the aim of conservatism is to conserve the cultural patrimony bequeathed to society by its ancestors. Conservatives defend the status quo insofar as it represents the visible summit of the past.

For much of the nineteenth century, American political movements did not adopt the title of “conservative”. This may have been an after-effect of the Revolution of 1776, in which Patriots clashed with Loyalists who maintained fealty to the British crown. Since the Patriots founded a new regime based on ideas of Enlightenment liberalism, hybridized with various other ideologies, this likely discredited early conservatism which allied itself with the ancien régime. Indeed, in its original European form, conservative politics was marked by hostility to the revolutionary Enlightenment – although, as we shall see, this relationship has always been complex.

Conservatism's twentieth-century rise in the United States was pioneered by a small band of intellectuals and activists who unabashedly claimed the name as their own. These early thoughtleaders sought to resist the dramatic societal changes that began with the New Deal but came to include feminism, the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, radical ecology, the counterculture, and the rapid evolution and expansion of progressive ideology. A trailblazing work was Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. Among other things, Kirk conjured forth a homegrown lineage for conservatism that included figures like John Adams and Alexis de Tocqueville (neither of whom thought of their own politics in these terms).

In this way, Kirk introduced a new idea into mainstream political discourse, while positioning it as a longstanding tradition. Viewed through Kirk's eyes, conservatism was simultaneously insurgent and venerably old. This was an important feat for an ideology suspicious of novelty and deferential to the authority of an inherited past.

Fascism was born in Europe as a new kind of ultra-nationalism after the massive shock of the First World War. The historian Tony Judt wrote: “Fascists don't really have concepts. They have attitudes”. Although this is surely an exaggeration, it captures an important truth about fascism as a cultural map. Namely, fascists believe politics consists of ceaseless struggle, often violent, against enemies of a nation both ethnic and ideological. Politics is not primarily about justice, but a primordial clash between what the Nazi legal jurist, Carl Schmitt, called the “friend” versus the “enemy”.

Since politics is an existential struggle for survival, fascists are sometimes willing to strategically compromise, even contradict, key beliefs in pursuit of victory. This often leads observers to misperceive fascism as incoherent. Pronouncements like those made by Umberto Eco – that fascism is “defined as irrationalism” – are not uncommon. But the truth is that fascism is far from lacking a kind of cultural coherence and sophisticated theoretical resources. However, one needs to imaginatively exit one's own map and employ a cultural approach to see how this ideology's borders, boundaries, coordinates and landmarks coalesce – something which even someone as brilliant as Eco clearly struggles to achieve.

Indeed, fascism's cartography has led intellectuals as arrestingly formidable as Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Giovanni Gentile and many others into its shadowlands. As students of ideology, we cannot preemptively dismiss fascism's ethically magnetic and sense-making features as “irrational”. To the contrary, giving into this temptation severely underplays the allure of fascist politics. As with all ideologies, people become fascists because its interpretation of life resonates, and in doing so begins to saturate identity, orient action and inspire the building of worlds. Political life is not simply or even primarily about properly working out a rational syllogism or the arithmetic of some ideological calculus. Instead, ideology makes an appeal to the human need and quest for meaning. If the opponents of fascism fail to recognize this they will become vastly less effective in combatting its politics.